... the powerful to account or informing the public. Rather, it is more prosaic things such as getting a story; producing enough to keep their jobs or advance their careers; and competing with their rivals on other similar papers or TV programmes – none of which are enhanced by straying off the reservation. Gary Webb and his stories about the CIA, the Contras and cocaine – the dark alliance as he called it – in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, illustrated what can happen when you leave the reservation. Despite the fact that Webb's stories about the CIA allowing cocaine trafficking into the US in exchange for funding for the Contras were true, Webb and the paper were ...

... been friends since his student days with the former MI6 officer Meta Ramsay, now Baroness Ramsay and a member of the government in the House of Lords.( 'Donald's Mata Hari', Daily Record [Glasgow] 9 August 1999) The mystery of MRA solved? The Francis Stoner Saunders book on the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the CIA, reviewed below, is full of riveting little snippets. The one that struck me first time I flipped through the index was this, on pp. 150/1.'...in May 1952, the newly strengthened PSB [Psychological Strategy Board of the US Government] formally took over the supervision and the pace and timing of ...

... solution, which, because of the extent of the political and economic forces impacting on it, has become a contemporary socio-economic problem. Democracy building's institutional formation rests upon a reconfiguration of Cold War positions that retain, what Dr. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky termed 'such interference, '( 1 )so as to continue subversive covert operations previously perpetrated by the CIA or MI6. This then, is a difficult area and few researchers are looking at the matter at a sufficient level of objective enquiry to outline satisfactorily some of its major contradictions. The bulk of researchers studying this problem propose policy solutions from within an overlapping institutional framework that ignores or rationalises subversion to effect covert foreign policy attempts at 'regime-change ...

... Control of Candy Jones by Donald Bain (in the UK, Futura, London, 1976). Candy Jones was the stage name of an American model of the 1940s, who married Knebel in 1972. The book is an account of how Knebel and Jones discovered, through hypnotic regression of Jones, that she had been used by the CIA as a programmed courier; had, in fact, been converted into a multiple personality of the kind described by Dr George Easterbrook in the last paragraphs of Martin Cannon's essay on Mind Control in Lobster 23. Or so it is claimed. The status of the Bain book is unclear to me. No documentary evidence is presented in the ...

... questions below, but I hope to clear up some of the major misunderstandings that have arisen about Moon's relationship with the Park regime. Perhaps the best starting point is provided by the rash of eye-opening newspaper articles that appeared in mid-March of 1978, which the following headline in the 16 March Washington Star perfectly summarized: 'Moon's Church Founded by Korean CIA Chief as Political Tool, Panel Says'. These articles were all based on an unevaluated U.S. CIA report released by the Fraser Subcommittee and dated 26 February 1963. This report stated that 'Kim Jong Pil organized the Unification Church while he was director of the ROK Central Intelligence Agency, and has been using the church, which had ...

... March '85. Is there a detailed analysis of these events somewhere in English? Lies of Our Times (November 1991) 'Stacking the Deck on the Bulgarian Connection' by Edward S. Herman and Howard Friel reported that at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Robert Gates, Melvin Goodman former division chief of the Office of Soviet Analysis at the CIA said: 'There was very good, sensitive DO [Directorate of Operations] evidence that suggested the Soviets were not linked to the assassination attempt on the Pope.' The CIA, said Goodman in the early 1980s 'had very good penetration of the Bulgarian secret services' and that these clandestine CIA sources had found no Soviet or Bulgarian involvement ...

... interesting. The first of these dates from 17 September 1970, shortly after Allende had defeated his right wing opponent, Jorge Alessandri, in the Presidential elections. There was then a short interval before the Congress was due to meet to confirm Allende's election on 24 October. The record( 'Genesis of Project FUBELT'), of a CIA meeting called by Director Richard Helms 'in connection with the Chilean situation', shows a US determination to undermine Allende. It shows that Helms told those present: 'That President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime in Chile was not acceptable to the United States. The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to ...

... . The book is somewhere between journalism and academic writing: that is, it is documented with footnotes but intermittently so. Here's a paragraph from page 25. 'When post-colonial regimes took the wrong political turn they generally did not last long. Official records from 1953 show that in British Guiana, the elected socialist government was overthrown by British and CIA terrorism in order to secure the flow of cheap sugar and bauxite. That was a busy year. The elected nationalist government in Iran met the same fate; claiming ownership of the nation's oil resources was beyond the pale.(24) British governments supported repression and killing in Uganda, Chile and South Africa. In Vietnam in the ...

... . And this was before Watergate. Indeed, lest we miss the point, Woodward tells us that 'Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis.' How interesting! That's what I thought! And so did every other liberal I knew at the time. Surprisingly, this was also the point-of-view of James McCord, the right-wing evangelist and former CIA officer who led the break-in team into the Watergate. In a series of odd 'newsletters', written after Watergate (and virtually uncirculated), McCord put forward a conspiracy theory suggesting that the Rockefeller family was lunging for complete control over the government's critical national security functions, using the Council on Foreign Relations and Henry Kissinger as its surrogates ...

... do: nonsense such as 'the world's ill are all caused by the Jews/Illuminati/whatever', what have been called the mega theories, simplify. But much of what is dismissed as conspiracy theories – parapolitics or deep politics – does not. The work of William Blum, for example,3 in detailing the role of the CIA in the USA's post-WW2 empire, complicates the study of American foreign policy (or would if academics and journalists could bring themselves to read it); and the work of the JFK researchers has produced almost unmanageable complexity. But then Blum and the better end of the Kennedy buffs aren't offering conspiracy theories so much as theories about conspiracies.4 Mega ...